Guest Opinion Essay

California juvenile reforms should proceed, despite probation officer lobbying efforts

California juvenile reforms: bar graph showing juvenile arrests in 1980 vs 2020

California arrests by age group in 1980 and 2020.

As California’s juvenile probation caseloads have plummeted and annual costs of incarcerating a single youth skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands of dollars, the state’s juvenile probation departments, nevertheless, have managed to stave off severe budget cuts and layoffs.

But that ride seemingly is ending as counties explore less costly alternatives to incarceration and probation.

First, consider the data: Arrests of persons under age 18 in California plunged from 400,000 in 1974 to 255,000 in 1995 to 43,000 in 2019 — to a record low of 26,000 in 2020. The number of youths incarcerated in the four remaining state-run juvenile prisons has fallen from 10,000 in 1995 to 700 in 2021.

As a result, the number of youths entering juvenile probation fell from 200,000 in 1995 to 21,000 in 2020.

What’s more, adults now occupy five-sixths of beds in California’s Division of Juvenile Justice facilities that increasingly are starved of juvenile clients. More inmates are 21 and older than younger than 18.

Proposals to raise the age when youth can be prosecuted as adults to 20 from the current 18 seems merely a way of propping up the current infrastructure by corralling even more adults into what began as a system for juveniles. While proponents may contend that the raise-the-age proposal is about saving kids, it’s really about putting more adults into the pipeline to rescue the existing juvenile system.

In its own effort to survive, the Chief Probation Officers of California is floating a new argument: Juvenile probation departments deserve credit for the decline in youth arrests. “Since 2007, California’s juvenile justice system, led by local probation departments, has successfully decreased juvenile detention rates by 60% and juvenile arrest rates by 73%,” the organization’s president boasts.

That’s malarkey. What’s driving the juvenile crime decline is not some amazing new rehabilitation strategy by probation officers, but the fact that fewer youth are entering the system in the first place. In particular, the younger youths whose arrests once fed the criminal justice beast are being arrested less and less. In 1978, the first year California reported the age of arrestees, a staggering 220 primary- and middle-school kids under age 15 were being arrested every day. In 2020, just 17 were arrested per day.

Young adults also don’t need to be in the bull’s eye of this system. Arrest rates for California’s 18- and 19-year-olds have fallen by 88% over the last 40 years and now approximate the arrest rates of 50-year-olds.

Lawmakers should reject appeals to maintain juvenile probation as-is

Unfortunately, at this critical juncture, the intensive lobbying efforts seek to return the existing system to a 1990 version of itself. The chief probation officers invoke “research on adolescent brain science that 18- and 19-year-olds are impulsive, make rash decisions ignoring long-term consequences.”

However, that new “science” has no scientific basis. It’s just a resurrection of psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s century-old myth of adolescent “savagery,” an obsolete prejudice that mislabeled youth, particularly those of color, and yielded a racialized system that over-polices and over-confines those very kids. Such claims merely repeat what University of Michigan psychology professor and veteran researcher Joseph Adelson once termed a “stubborn, fixed set of falsehoods” about adolescents that has persisted, decade after decade.

Many California social service agencies have been troubled to learn that probation agencies are grabbing a disproportion share of the funds saved by reduced juvenile incarceration, despite the drop in youth probation referrals and a century of evidence that the juvenile system has proven unwilling to reform itself. Even after years of court mandates and promises to change, a 2019 report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that abuses still pervade youth facilities and that youth battled extreme boredom, lacked adequate education and job training, and experienced high rates of recidivism.

Yet, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has contracted to consult with probation officers, providing “training and other technical assistance.” Why would state leaders and reform-minded foundations hitch their wagons to juvenile probation, the bygone phase of the justice system, instead of, say, the California Conservation Corps, the future?

If foundation consultants are seeking to direct probation departments away from their policing-oriented assumptions about youth, they should be renouncing probation officers’ efforts to filch credit for the youth-crime decline, to push antiquated myths about adolescent brains and to maintain their foothold in youths’ lives.

We don’t need to award probation departments more money to over-staff juvenile facilities that are being emptied of youth or to overreach in youths’ communities or to retry failed tactics from the past.

It’s good news that fewer California youth are ensnared in the juvenile system

Today, many California youth who, based on standards of past eras, might have seemed at-risk for justice-involvement have never encountered the justice system, even for minor offenses. That trend augurs wonderfully for a future in which young people do not spend a lifetime struggling to undo damage done by having a criminal record or battling the traumas that incarceration inflicts.

Even so, that lesser number of young people who still are getting arrested (and re-arrested) present new challenges. Innovative, effective strategies are needed to reintegrate them into the community. For them, the same old, probation-incarceration management canards will not work.

Certainly, probation officers adaptable to this new era would be valuable additions to the agencies that are formulating intensive education, training, occupation and employment services for the young people still entering the system, as well as for eligible justice-involved adults.

Today’s challenge is not to refurbish the old system. The challenge is to build a new system that takes full advantage of the massive behavior improvements young people are bringing to a state that desperately needs their energies.

Mike Males is a  senior research fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in San Francisco.

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